Taking your own digital photo

The following instructions will help you take a digital picture of yourself, suitable for submission as part of your class enrollment. Among other things, this helps the class staff get to know you by face. It makes class more interesting when we can call you by name instead of "Hey, you with the green hair."

If you don't have a digital camera, one of your friends almost certainly does. These cameras usually take very high resolution images. Please reduce this image using your favorite tools to 160x120 before submitting it. If it's a JPEG image and you have it on an owlnet machine, you would type something like this:

djpeg huge_picture.jpg | pnmscale -width 160 -height 120 | cjpeg > small_picture.jpg

or this:

convert -geomtetry 160x120 huge_picture.jpg > small_picture.jpg

Note: this tends to work great for most digital cameras, which take pictures in the same shape as a typical TV screen (a 4:3 aspect ratio). If you've got something else, or if you want to be clever and reuse some old picture of yourself, please crop it to a 4:3 ratio (yes, wider than it is tall -- no vertical shots) before scaling the picture down. You can crop your picture using Photoshop, if you've got it, or something like gimp, which is installed on the Owlnet machines.


Dan Wallach, CS Department, Rice University
Last modified: Mon Jan 14 16:31:58 CST 2002